An easy way to test interoperability and conformance

Abstract

In IP world, interoperability testing is heavily used to check the correctness of different implementations. In Telecom world conformance test is used for the same purpose. Internet protocols have growing importance in communicating systems, thus 'interoperability or conformance' become an important question. In this we paper we show that the borders between interoperability test and conformance testing is not so sharp and we do not have to choose because we can derive conformance tests from interoperability tests. First, we define an interoperability testing framework that can be used in general. We present MAIT (Model for Automated Interoperability Test) and give detailed explanation on its components and their roles. Then we show how to construct conformance tests by re-using parts of an existing interoperability test suite. We describe how the interoperability test suite and the conformance test suite for the same protocol look like. Then we construct the re-using method by comparing these test suites and by identifying the re-usable parts. We also investigate the resulted test suite to find out the goodness of the conversion. At the end, we show how to use this methodology through an example.